Crane Safety? Just A Formality . . .

It’s a bad time to get arraigned for taking bribes:

The city’s chief crane inspector was arrested on Friday and charged with taking bribes to allow cranes to pass inspection, the authorities said. He was also accused of taking money from a crane company that sought to ensure that its employees would pass the required licensing exam.

The man, James Delayo, 60, the acting chief inspector for the Cranes and Derricks Unit at the city’s Department of Buildings, oversaw the issuing of city licenses for crane operators. The case against him, announced by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the city’s Department of Investigation, was filed just a week after the city’s second fatal crane collapse in less than three months.

Officials said the accusations against Mr. Delayo bore no direct relation to the accident last week at 91st Street and First Avenue, where two workers died, or the crane accident on East 51st Street that left seven dead in March.

But the case was another blemish on a Buildings Department that has been reeling from construction deaths and inspection lapses this year, and for which deadly crane accidents are part of a lingering series of problems.

. . .

Mr. Delayo, whose Legal Aid lawyer said little that could be heard during the arraignment, entered no plea during the proceeding before Judge Abraham Clott of Criminal Court. Mr. Delayo, appearing slightly hunched and wearing a white shirt with thin blue and brown stripes, held his pants up, apparently because he had no belt on. Later, as he left the building housing Mr. Morgenthau’s office, he wore a red bandanna as a makeshift belt.

Mr. Met Has A Posse . . .

. . . to ward off amazingly idiotic patrons:

Cops called out a rowdy baseball buff who tried to take on Mr. Met.

At a recent game, the drunken fan manhandled the Amazin’s smiling, giant-baseball-headed mascot, police said. He also allegedly knocked down kids and took a swing at a security guard.

The action happened at last Saturday’s thriller, which ended with a 3-2 Met come-from-behind win against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Christian Hansen of Gowanus, Brooklyn, was seen “harassing Mr. Met and pushing little children out of the way” at Shea Stadium, a law-enforcement source said.

When security officials told the soused sports nut to leave, he refused.

See also: Mr. Met.

Message: Coordinated! [Insert Jubilant Handshakes And Backslaps Here]

So as new taxes make a pack of cigarettes cost up to $12, think long and hard about what terrorist organization you’re funding by buying bootleg smokes:

Nearly two dozen Arab cigarette smugglers have been smoked out for buying and then reselling contraband butts to New York bodegas and other shops.

Lured by fake ads in Arabic-language newspapers, the smugglers bought $6 million in contraband smokes from New York tax and federal undercover agents.

And a top elected official now warns that the untaxed cigarettes could be funding terror overseas.

All the profits of the smugglers — whose sales to hundreds of area stores exceeds the business of most legitimate wholesalers — “was shipped overseas to the Middle East,” said Deputy Commissioner William Comiskey of the state Taxation and Finance Office.

“We know that the money wasn’t kept here,” said Comiskey, whose agents conducted the elaborate sting, noting that “it’s a possibility” that the smugglers’ multimillion-dollar operations, which also include sales of guns and counterfeit tax stamps, could be at least partly funding terrorism.

. . .

Noting that the suspected smugglers ducked paying $10 million in New York taxes, [Rep. Peter King (R-LI)] added, “If this money is going overseas, and this money is going to Hezbollah and Hamas . . . we’re talking about life and death, we’re talking about a very serious terror issue.”

The sting led to the arrests of 21 out of 27 men named in money-laundering, trafficking and conspiracy indictments unsealed this week. Most of them are originally from Yemen and Jordan.

The case, which is being prosecuted by federal authorities in Virginia, was set in motion in early 2007 by New York state Tax and Finance agents, who set up a warehouse in King George County, Va., and stocked it with cases of untaxed cigarettes.

The warehouse was extensively wired for audio and video surveillance.

The agents then took out an ad in an Arabic-language newspaper in New Jersey, offering “Tobacco for less . . . special prices for the Arab and African community,” and asking those interested to call a phone with a Virginia area code.

Have You Ever Actually Used Those Things?

Nothing sounds as unsexy as a sexual tryst in a subway bathroom, but then there you have it — a sexual tryst in a subway bathroom:

A police sting has resulted in the arrests of six men at two Queens subway-station bathrooms known as notorious trysting spots for men.

The six were busted over a 90-minute period Tuesday afternoon in the bathrooms of the 71st-Continental Avenue station in Forest Hills and the Union Turnpike station in Kew Gardens. They were charged with public lewdness, the sources said.

. . .

. . . “They’re notorious. They’ve been historically active bathrooms for that kind of stuff,” said one police source.

Cops made the six arrests after hiding in bathroom closets.

At Union Turnpike, a transit employee said cops conducted another sting four weeks ago.

“Every 20 minutes to half-hour, police would leave the bathroom with a bunch of guys,” he said.

Friends, When You Mug, Mug Them With Kindness, Not 20-Pound Rocks

Moral of the story — perhaps the rock part was overkill:

A hulking mugger who struck twice in five hours was busted yesterday when he picked on the wrong man — a 6-footer who fought back with his fists because “it’s very hard to scare me,” police sources said.

The victim, David Breksa, 39, was slammed in the ear and bitten on the chest by his attacker, Larry Benekin, 35, who allegedly tried to smash a cobblestone over his head — after smashing another man with a rock five hours earlier.

“I turn around to defend myself,” Breksa said. “He comes at me and I punched him in the chest. He goes backward and leans down and picks up a big friggin’ rock. It was a good 20-pounder. It was one of those big cobblestones. That rock is big enough to kill somebody.”

But Breksa, of East Harlem, tackled Benekin and they went at it at 109th Street and Central Park West at 1:15 a.m.

The 6-foot-1, 240-pound Benekin managed to grab Breksa’s cellphone and run off, but Breksa chased him and hailed some passing cops, who collared the mugger and petty thief, the sources said.